Fighting HIV/AIDS is generally a hard subject, often full of sad stories ranging from friends dying to unbelievable statistics. During our travels in Southern Africa, Joelle and I were shocked at the extent of its reach. Everywhere you went and everyone you spoke with had a story. Near the border with Lesotho it was the steady stream of gardeners who were a bit under the weather, which always meant they were going to die soon. In Malawi it was the South African doctors who told one horror story after another about treating patients day after day who came to the hospital not for treatment, but to die. In Botswana it was the newspaper story of over 100 kids who received shots from an infected needle and who were then sick. In Victoria Falls it was the wonderful "show" at a camping lot made up of orphans who lost their parents to AIDS. It was the constant scene of fresh graves in every village regardless of size. Reports of HIV rates varied from 25% to nearly 40% of the population in the various areas.
All of those scenes are burned into our memory so when I read a story like this, it's hard not to celebrate and spread the good word. Wouldn't it be nice if other countries borrowed from this? What a great report out of Haiti.
In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.
Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.
In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti's success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country's specific challenges.
Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port-au-Prince's GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world's oldest AIDS clinic.
"The Haitian AIDS community feels like they're out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are," said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. "They really do some of the best work in the world."
Main & gay blog